


Folklore

by quisquam



Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-03-18 04:21:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13674165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quisquam/pseuds/quisquam
Summary: Where Six was from, they said all sorts of things about men.





	Folklore

From time to time, Courier Six imagined writing home.

 

 _Mom,_ she imagined beginning, _your infilial daughter has returned!_ She had no plans to return, but she couldn’t imagine a letter starting in any other way.

 

She carried those imaginary letters with her across the Mojave, her heart growing heavier with each addition.

 

 _Mom_ , she wrote, _I fixed a nightstalker_ _’s broken leg, and he_ _’s followed me for weeks like a ghost._

 

_Mom, I slaughtered an entire camp of men._

_Mom, I killed Caesar._

_Mom, I almost died._

She could never quite bring herself to set pen to paper, and besides, she reasoned, the Yunsongese script she’d grown up with was half-forgotten by her bullet-scarred brain. But nights in the endless twilight of the Lucky 38 stretched before her, and the stacks of letters grew.

 

_Mom, I visited the Big Mountain. It was just like the stories. There were prisoners there, as old as Two-Books Kuo, and they begged me to kill them._

_Mom, I fell in love._

 

Some nights she could imagine her mother’s voice, her accent all soft and Northern Provinces round. ‘ _Ah Min,_ _’_ she would say, calling Six by the milk name she’d abandoned when she left home, ‘ _don_ _’t you dare tell me that_. The Yunsongese always said that love was for men, that men had the time and the energy for such foolish pursuits. It was a pity, they said, for a woman to die before her husband, for it was women who knew the pain of the world, and for a man to know it would be to drive him mad.

The first time she met Craig Boone, she knew they were right.

 

He followed her like Little Ghost, the nightstalker without a pack, and at first she did not know what to make of him. He had the same haunted look as the widowers of Yunsong and an apathy towards death that Six could appreciate. He was a good shot, which she cold respect, and he did not say much, which won him _major_ points in her book.

 

Some nights, when Little Ghost curled up to sleep next to him and the fire dwindled to coals, he would doze, his rifle falling from his slack arms. She would watch him then, his face soft with sleep, and imagine what he had once been like. Had he ever laughed? Had he ever strung more than three words together at a time? He would smile in his sleep and Six would fight the nascent urge to wrap him in a blanket, to give him some other comfort than the weight of a gun in his hands.

It wasn’t until after they’d gone to Bitter Springs together that she realized she loved him, and two months after _that_ that she added it to the invisible stack of letters.

 

She’d almost died at Bitter Springs, which, in retrospect, was _absurd_. She’d survived killing Caesar; the tyrant of the East ended by a mailman, a grandmother, and a limpy nightstalker, so when she found herself lying gut shot in a refugee camp, some _fucking_ green recruit grinning because he was sure he’d killed The Courier, she almost yelled in frustration.

 

In Yunsong they said that that Death walked beside women, that women learned not to fear Death when they had their first blood. Lying there, bleeding out in the Mojave dawn, Six figured they were right; she’d been here before, death felt comfortable, the darkness clouding her vision familiar.

 

Boone must have stimmed her after she drifted out, because the next thing that she knew she was lying on a cot, his stormy face looking down at her.

 

“I’m not gonna lose you too.”

  
As if that explained anything.

 

As if that explained everything.

 

She saw the change in the way he looked at her after that, like she was made of glass. More than once he grabbed her arm to pull her away from some fight, moved in front of her holding his rifle like a shield, like a charm.

 

 _‘_ _Don_ _’_ _t hold it against him, Ah Min_ _’_ her mother’s voice would whisper in her ears, _‘_ _it_ _’_ _s how they are. It_ _’_ _s all they know_ _’_. As if that helped.

 

“Boone,” she said one night as they sat around yet another campfire, “You don’t need to be like this. I’m bulletproof, remember?”

 

He had come between her and a machete-wielding asshole that morning, and though his armor had taken the worst of the blow, they’d spent more than a couple of stims trying to stop the bleeding. Now in the darkness, he turned to her, his face half-shadowed by the flickering firelight and shook his head “No. I saw you at Bitter Springs. You ain’t bulletproof.”

 

He slept hard that night, the buzzy high from the stimpacks worn off. Six watched him sleep, watched his face contort in some private horror. Her brother had broken his arm once, the sort of clean break that feels more numb than painful, but he’d sobbed inconsolably none the less. They’d brewed him poppy seed tea sweetened with honey, and her mother had sighed sadly as he drifted off to sleep, _‘Boys know nothing of pain. All we can do is protect them from it_ ’.

 

She sighed and unfolded her blanket. As she spread it over Boone’s shoulders he seemed to settle, face relaxing against the rough material of his pack.

 

It was enough.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not happy with how this ends, but I couldn't find another way out.


End file.
